Leonardo Da Vinci Society Newsletter Editor: Maya Corry Issue 43, October 2016
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Leonardo da Vinci Society Newsletter Editor: Maya Corry Issue 43, October 2016 Forthcoming event 30th Anniversary Lecture on Friday 4 Novem- As interest in Leonardo continues to beget exhibitions, con- ber ferences and publications that probe every aspect of his thought and output, the myth that he was in some way ‘inde- The Failure of Pictures: From Description to Dia- pendent’ of his time is being slowly dismantled. Extraordi- gram in the Circle of Galileo nary as so many of his endeavours were, they were deeply Professor David Freedberg, Warburg Institute and intimately bound up with the investigations, debates and pursuits that occupied his contemporaries. At the Society’s To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the launch of the Leo- annual lecture in May, Professor Andrew Gregory provided nardo da Vinci Society, which took place in early November a lively survey of the anatomical learning and intellectual cli- 1986, Professor David Freedberg, Director of the Warburg mate that shaped and informed Leonardo’s approach to the Institute, will give a special lecture entitled The Failure of human body. Pictures: From Description to Diagram in the Circle of Gal- ileo. The lecture will be held on Friday 4 November 2016, at Renaissance attitudes to the body cannot be comprehended 6pm, in the lecture theatre of the Warburg Institute, Woburn by the examination of any single field of knowledge, as Pro- Square, London WC1. fessor Gregory’s wide-ranging approach ably demonstrated. As an apprentice in Verrocchio’s bottega in Florence, the Professor Freedberg writes: When Federico Cesi and his young Leonardo would have made many life drawings – of- friends in the Accademia dei Lincei – generally regarded as ten of other garzoni from the workshop – as well as copying the first modern scientific society – decided to make and col- models, casts and designs of figures and body parts. By the lect drawings of everything in nature, their main points of ref- time he was in Milan in the 1480s and 1490s, he had become erence were Galileo and Leonardo. But the more drawings friends with physicians and was making avid use of his in- they collected the more they realized the impossibility of or- creased access to books to consult medical texts. His anatom- dering and systematising the multiplicity of nature. Despite ical investigations were bounded by the knowledge he inher- the splendour of many of their drawings, most little known ited, along with all his peers, from classical authorities such until recently, and the environmental attentiveness of many as Galen, and the medieval scholarship of Avicenna, Mon- others, they swiftly became aware of the near-futility of their dino de’ Luzzi and others. In conjunction with these influ- efforts. Neither the telescope nor the microscope provided ences, he was exploring the significance of contemporary the- them with the essential clues needed to create the order they ories of mathematics, perspective and geometry to the human sought, or the clear borderlines between species that the drive form. The drawings Leonardo made of ideally proportioned to more rigorous systems of taxonomy and classification re- figures (most famously, of course, the Vitruvian Man) are quired. Halfway through their efforts, Galileo subverted all thus intimately connected to both his wider artistic practice traditional modes of understanding nature, and Cesi began to and his work as an anatomist. realise that pictures might have to yield to mathematics, and description to diagram. This lecture will retrace their journey Having established these links, Professor Gregory turned to a with vivid examples, and conclude with the implications for more detailed consideration of the history of dissection and our time. anatomical investigation in the early modern era. Many as- pects of Galenic thought that are apparent in Leonardo’s drawings and notes, and which are today recognised as incor- rect, stem from the fact that the great physician was denied access to human cadavers due to the religious strictures of his Recent Events time. His reliance on the bodies of Barbary apes inevitably introduced errors – some of which Leonardo probed and questioned, others of which he accepted as fact. It was not The Leonardo da Vinci Society Annual Lecture until the publication of Andreas Vesalius’s magisterial and 2016 beautifully illustrated De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body), in 1543, that many of Galen’s Art and Anatomy in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth assumptions were disproved. Centuries Yet the lecture refused to present a neat, narrative history of Professor Andrew Gregory, University College the displacement of one medical authority by another. London ‘Renaissance man’ or ‘universal genius’ or that he invented the helicopter, tank, et cetera. What struck me was the sheer difference in scale between the British- and Italian-made three-dimensional models designed following, as far as was practicable, Leonardo’s drawings and descriptions. The British items, made in the era of austerity following the country’s emergence from the war, were dwarfed in comparison to their Italian counterparts. The for- mer were centimetres across compared with the metres of the latter, suggesting a more significant investment of resource by the Italians. What this exhibition seemed to illustrate was the respective attitudes of Britain and Italy towards culture, including sci- ence and engineering. Despite all the wartime problems ex- perienced by the Italians, it was evidently worthwhile for them to dedicate scarce resources to a significant cultural un- dertaking than to other areas which might, in Britain, have been deemed more important. Judging by the current and in some cases irreversible damage being deliberately inflicted on cultural institutions in this country by the government's austerity programme, it seems to me that very little has changed since 1952 so far as Britain’s priorities are con- cerned. I somehow doubt if this was the message that the organisers of the Science Museum exhibition had intended to get across as they put it together. I would also think that the vast major- ity of the exhibition visitors did not take away that message, Rather, Professor Gregory framed his argument in more in- preferring the usual Leonardo tropes. All that is a pity, since teresting terms – questioning the spiritual beliefs that under- it will only be by understanding and then protesting at what pinned and informed the work of many early modern physi- is happening to culture in this country, that government poli- cians and anatomists. Just as Leonardo had been concerned cies and public attitudes can be reversed; otherwise we may to comprehend the divine harmonies that ruled the proportion not be able to afford such exhibitions again. and workings of the body, so in the early seventeenth century William Harvey perceived the circulation of the blood as Frank James analogous to weather cycles. This sense of the human body Royal Institution / University College London as a microcosmic synecdoche of the macrocosm of creation indicates that the modern-day chasm separating scientific from religious thought is a relatively recent phenomenon. Maya Corry Conference reports University of Cambridge Leonardo in Britain: collections and reception Review: ‘Leonardo da Vinci: The Mechanics of Conference organised by Juliana Barone (Birk- Genius’ beck, University of London) and Susanna Avery- Quash (National Gallery, London) An exhibition at the Science Museum, London, 10 February to 4 September 2016 25-27 May 2016, London In 1952, seven years after the end of WWII, the quincen- The first thing to note about the conference is its choice of tenary of the birth of Leonardo da Vinci was celebrated. subject matter and the impressively comprehensive way it Among the events were two exhibitions: one in Milan, which was explored. The theme itself was derived from fruitful con- led to the founding of the Museo Nazionale della Scienza e versations the organisers had with the late, and much missed, della Tecnologia, and one in the Royal Academy, London, Romano Nanni (former director of the Biblioteca Vinciana in held at the suggestion of colleagues from the Science Mu- Vinci), who strongly supported the realisation of this confer- seum. The content of these two exhibitions came together in ence. It followed two earlier conferences which had looked this 2016 Science Museum display and prompt a number of at the reception history of Leonardo in France and in Russia. thoughts beyond the usual tropes such as Leonardo was a The Leonardo da Vinci Society Page 2 Registered Charity 1012878 Thus far there has been sparse interest in British collections of Leonardo’s art and responses to his ideas in Britain. Apart The first paper by Martin Clayton introduced the early re- from Juliana Barone and Martin Kemp’s 2010 publication I ception of Leonardo’s drawings in Britain, in particular the disegni di Leonardo da Vinci e della sua cerchia. Collezioni anatomical studies, the ones that Vasari had seen at Francesco in Gran Bretagna, there has been little work on the Melzi’s workshop in Milan. Clayton explored the provenance topic. Consequently, a major focus of the conference was de- of the considerable group of 555 autograph drawings held at voted to an exploration of the provenance of the master’s Windsor Castle. Passing from Pompeo Leoni to the Earl of paintings and manuscripts within the British Isles, as they Arundel, they entered the Royal Collection in 1690. Never- passed through different hands and received different attrib- theless, these original sheets were forgotten about over time utions, from the fifteenth century up to the present day. and began to be studied only at the end of the nineteenth cen- tury, around the time of the publication of Leonardo’s Note- books. Jacqueline Thalmann explored the reasons why General John Guise (1682-1765) acquired a number of Leonardo’s drawings and paintings for his collection, which he later left to Christ Church, Oxford.